Regos politika. Lietuva Rusijos imperijoje
LTKnygoje analizuojami XIX amžiuje istorinės Lietuvos teritorijoje plitę masinio vartojimo vaizdai ir kolektyviniai jų žiūros būdai. Mėginama atsakyti į klausimus: kaip formavosi „korporatyvinės“ vizualinės praktikos; kaip vizualinės praktikos siejosi su įvairių socialinių grupių interesais ir lūkesčiais, kaip veikė jų narių vaizduotę; kiek šie reiškiniai buvo panašūs visoje Rusijos imperijoje ir kokiais atžvilgiais skyrėsi; ar Romanovų valdose, taip pat ir buvusiose Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės žemėse, vaizdų eksploatavimo tikslai ir metodai buvo analogiški tiems, kurie susiklostė kitose Europos šalyse; ir galų gale – ar vakariniame carinės valstybės pakraštyje egzistavo tam tikra žiūros ir regos politika, panaši į politinį reguliavimą, taikytą kalbos atžvilgiu.
ENIn his renowned book Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson defined a nation as an imagined political body united by a common language and a print media. According to Anderson, it was precisely the information disseminated through the media in a common language, understood by all its users, that brought unrelated individuals into a like-minded group of people embracing shared values. Thus, in his view, a nation is a community of speakers and readers consolidated by the philological revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. To paraphrase Anderson, the subject of this book is the “seeing communities”, i.e., different political, ethnic, and professional groups that create, disseminate, and use shared images. These “visual” groups are not understood as being in opposition to “reading communities” identified by Anderson, but rather as another aspect of that expression. In the Western humanities, there are numerous efforts to explore the collective forms of looking and seeing. Similar trends are also becoming apparent in Lithuanian academic studies focused on the political, cultural, and artistic phenomena of the 19th century. Generally speaking, we can observe a convergence of the positions of language-oriented specialists in political and social history and visual-oriented art historians over the past two decades: the former increasingly focus their attention on various images, while the latter explore the socio-political context of visual art. However, this resurgent historiography still fails to avoid a certain degree of inertia: with rare exceptions, historians tend to treat images as simple sources and signs, without delving deeper into the specifics of their function, while art researches often use the facts of social life as a mere backdrop for aesthetic phenomena, without searching for more fundamental links between the social milieu and art.This book precisely seeks to overcome the passive interpretation of the relationship between sociality and visuality. By examining the mass consumption images and the collective ways of seeing them that prevailed in Lithuania in the 19th century, it attempts to answer such questions as: How were “corporate” visual practices developed? How did different social groups express their interests through visual practices, and how did such practices affect the imagination of communities? To what extent were these phenomena similar throughout the Russian Empire and in what respects did they differ? Were the aims and methods of image exploitation in lands controlled by the Romanovs, including the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, analogous to those developed in other European countries? And, f inally, was there a certain policy of vision on the western borderland of the tsarist state, similar to the political regulation imposed upon language?.The research in this book spans the entire long 19th century, from the last division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 to World War One. It focuses mainly on the late Russian imperial period, when the visual media, which experienced a qualitative leap in reproduction technology, became an important instrument for the popularization of political ideas, the dissemination of knowledge, and the mobilization and control of the general public. The geographical scope of the analysis covers the so-called Northwest Region, which included the provinces of Vilnius, Kaunas, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev, and the territory of which more or less corresponded to the lands held by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 18th century. Although this geographical area underwent major processes of cultural and political differentiation during the period in question, until the fall of the Romanov state it functioned as a certain administrative unit, ruled by common decrees and a single network of executive institutions, and it was perceived not only by those in power, but also by the majority of local inhabitants (primarily the local Polish-speaking elite) as a distinct region. [...].
